THE UNDERGROUNDGRAMMARIAN

Volume Fourteen, Number Two............March 1990

The Ordeal by Fire

"The curriculum in the public school
system seems to me to be anti-family," she says. "It invades
the privacy of the family in the primary years particularly, and in
later years it encourages children to challenge the authority of their
parents."

By all accounts Mr. Harris's early life
was a nightmare of physical and psychological terror at the hands
of his parents. He was born three months premature to an alcoholic
mother who delivered him after being repeatedly kicked by his father.
For years he suffered severe beatings at the hands of his father,
who also threatened to shoot him and sometimes choked him until he
convulsed, witnesses said.

THE "Mr. Harris"
named above is Robert
Alton Harris, who is just now enjoying a stay of his execution in
San Quentin. He was convicted of a notably callous double murder, but
his defenders are now reminding the courts of his dismal childhood,
citing, and we believe them, incapacities such as "organic brain
disorder, fetal alcohol syndrome, and post-traumatic stress disorder
as a result of being severely abused as a child."

It is an interesting case, but not in
the least unusual. Harris's real name is Legion. While our courts will
surely have some trouble finding its justice, we suspect the ordinary
citizen will not need the wisdom of Solomon to send both the father
and the son to the gas chamber, and perhaps, after some further investigation,
the mother as well. The courts can't know, because they are not people,
but people do know, that all our picky arguments about deterrence and
rehabilitation are just not to the point. If there is to be civilization,
there is, there must be, what e e cummings called, in absolutely perfect
and irreplaceable language, "some shit up with which we will not
put."

The first epigraph quotes a certain Lavinia
Greenwood, who seems to live a normal, decent, conscientious life in
the Province of British Columbia. She spoke to the Social Concerns Unit
of the local Anglican diocese. She said much more, of course, but life
is short; we stop there for now.

And here is Michael Laurence, who is one
of Harris's attorneys: "Robert Harris wasn't born evil; he wasn't
born a monster. If anyone had intervened when he was a child, I don't
think he would be on death row today."

And here, not even the wisdom of Solomon
would be enough; we need also the omniscience of the Sybil. There are
uncertainties in Laurence's sad observation. What, exactly and completely,
is the effect of that "organic brain disorder"? What, exactly
and completely, is monstrosity in human beings? Is it, perhaps, something
like the effect of that fetal alcohol syndrome? Would that mean that,
born one or not, that he now is a monster who should be kept alive in
his monstrousness? And would the intervention of just anyone
have kept Harris off death row, or would it need someone special? Who
would that be, and in what way special?

And what would Lavinia Greenwood have
to say to Robert Harris, or to that imagined intervener who did not
intervene? Had Harris been encouraged to "challenge the authority
of his parents," would two boys have been spared a terrifying and
fatal encounter with someone who, exactly like the compliant and dutiful
child that so delights certain parents, went forth into the world with
all the very values, attitudes and beliefs by which his parents lived?
Or would she be willing to concede, in certain cases at least, in cases
unlike hers, that the best thing a school could do for its pupils would
be to inculcate rebellion?

Here is the question at the heart of this
consideration: What can we say of this "authority of the family,"
to which both Lavinia Greenwood and Harris's miserable father are presumed
to be entitled? Where does that authority find its legitimacy and its
license? Is there any rational connection between the production of
offspring, of which just about anyone is capable, and the rule of another's
life, of which it may well be that no one is capable? Does the authority
of the family obey, in turn, some higher authority, lest it fall into
foolishness or vice? And what is that, and whence does it derive its
legitimacy?

Of course, we all know what people mean
when they invoke the authority of the family. They mean that they want
their children to believe what their parents believe, and they mean
also that they have a right to want that, and even a right to
achieve that.

But there's more to it than that, and
to point out that Harris did believe what his parents believed
would not bring authoritarians to think again about what they want.
They also believe that what they believe is true, and that it
ought not to be questioned, or, as they call it, "challenged."
Whenever you hear laments about the undermining of family authority,
you can be pretty sure that some religious sectarianism is at stake.

All religions, of course, endow parents--right
thinking parents, that is--not only with the authority, but with the
obligation to keep their offspring in the fold into which they were
born. It is the domestic version of missionary zeal. In a larger context,
however, that same zeal accords not only the authority but also the
obligation industriously to set about the pious work of undermining
the authority of other parents, in Tahiti or Timbuktu, perhaps,
or any parents anywhere who hold wrong beliefs. If, through some
quirk of destiny, Lavinia Greenwood had been able to bring little Bobby
Harris to despise and utterly to reject the example set for him by his
parents, her co-religionists would surely not accuse her of intruding
where she has no business. She complains that the school people ask
"a lot of questions about what home and family are like--who washes
up, how parents behave, and so on." And so they do; they are infernal
busybodies, forever prying and preaching. But what would she
have done had she, piously and properly, undertaken the task of bringing
little Bobby out of what she must call darkness and danger? How else
could she have discovered his plight? How could she preach until she
had pried?

We do not intend, of course, anything
even close to an exoneration of the manipulative and dogmatic agenda
of the school people. We do intend, alas, to suggest that it is different
only in particulars and not in principle from the manipulative and dogmatic
agendas of the religionists, the new-agers, the conservatives, the liberals,
the atheists, or of any other sect of true believers, probably even
the vegetarians. They are all the same, except for the particular content
of their beliefs. Some break the big end, some the little. But all of
them have one colossal belief in common; they all believe that they
believe is true, and that other believers are mistaken.

And this--what a sad thing to say--is what
the Harris family and the Greenwood family have in common. While the
Greenwoods can surely express and elaborate their beliefs, people like
the Harrises can only live by theirs. But they do, they do. Nor, in
either case, are they easily to be dissuaded. Such is faith.

The Hubble
Space Telescope is now in orbit. Some day, it may work. Of it, Timothy
Ferris, writing for the New York Times, says this:

"It is a machine for subjecting our
conceptions of the wider universe to an ordeal by fire, for hostaging
theories to the verdict of fresh and better observations. The willingness
to expose cherished ideas to such tests, indeed the insistence that
we do so at every opportunity, is what distinguishes science from theology
or philosophy."

Well, there is a grain of truth in all
that. Scientists besotted with ideology are not utterly unknown. For
theologians, who can draw valid conclusions from premises that can be
neither falsified nor verified, there can be no Hubble Telescope, no
imaginable refinement of observation. And philosophy, except in the
sense in which every Miss America contestant will claim to have one,
seems to have been invented for the very purpose of trying ideas by
fire. But it is surely true that some scientists have sometimes gone
looking to find themselves wrong.

And theirs is a very different case from
that of scientists who merely turn out to have been wrong. In their
case, the fire has burned its way into their labs, as it will, given
enough time, burn its way into every lab. Although science will probably
have to stop some day, for the passing of its last practitioner, it
will never be finished.

It is the scientist who sets the fire
and then steps into it to whom honor and glory are due. Such a one says,
in effect, In something, perhaps in something small, perhaps in something
momentous, I may well be wrong. I suppose that I am right, of
course, but so too does anyone who is wrong. In fact, you can not possibly
be wrong without supposing that you are right. If I am wrong
then, I can at least do my best to discover my error, putting aside
for now my suppositions as to my rightness.

Who could fail to admire such a plan,
and to applaud its execution?

Who? We'll tell you who. Lavinia Greenwood,
for example. And all who can suppose that there is something evil about
a challenge to the authority of the family, whatever that means. It
does not take a scientist to suppose that he may be wrong. It does not
take a learned jurist to consider what sort of "right" any
one person might have to order and govern not only the ordinary social
behavior but even the inner life of belief and conviction in another
person, and whether the having of that right implies some corresponding
responsibility, and what that responsibility might be. It does not take
a philosopher to ask by whose authority it is that he now deems himself
an authority legitimately constituted to raise up others by his rule.
It takes no more than a single human person to say, I could be wrong.

But to some people all such considerations
are impossible. They imagine they know the truth. With them there is
no talking, no quietly asking and answering in turn, no giving of an
account. They take testimony for evidence, and will not be moved. They
can detect no difference between skepticism, which doubts, and cynicism,
which denies.

Skepticism is a virtue. As bravery is
the temperate middle ground between cowardice and rashness, skepticism
is the sanity that lies between gullibility and nihilism. There can
be no education where there is no skepticism, and children reared in
authoritarian belief clubs must discover skepticism or move out to one
of the extremes, believing either anything at all, or nothing at all.

So there's your choice. If you insist
that your child grow up in your faith, whether religious or political,
you will either succeed or fail. If you succeed, you will have produced
yet another gullible clod, who will be very useful not only to true
believers but also to an even more numerous company, to hypocrites and
charlatans who want either some votes or some donations, or both. If
you fail, you will have rebellion in the family and little joy of your
life. If you ever do learn to question and doubt, it will be in the
bitterness of your last days, when the tardy awakening of your mind
will bring not wonder but fear, not comfort but pain, and the only virtue
that never keeps company with peace--remorse. And your children will
be polite, but they will not rise up to call you blessed.

If you don't like either of those alternatives,
then try to come up with another. And when that proves impossible, try
to imagine some sort of family life in which there is nothing to challenge,
for the simple reason that the parents are themselves always challenging
their own beliefs, always wondering, always testing. The children of
that sort of family would even be able to challenge the challenges fostered
by the schools, for they would have learned that the authority that
comes from reason seems to have a natural and legitimate license, unlike
the "authorities" of school or of family, both of which have
to be claimed and fought over by those who want them. An unseemly and
disquieting business, not unlike the self-seeking scramble for the "authority"
of public office, which inspires--even in young people, and perhaps especially
in young people--not reverence but contempt, and thus cynicism.

Here is some ancient lore from Lao
Tzu, who had obviously the secret of true prophecy, which is nothing
more arcane than the ability to distinguish between particulars and
principles: "The best of all rulers is but a shadowy presence to
his subjects. Next comes the ruler they love and praise; next comes
the one they fear and obey; next comes the one with whom they take liberties."
And, of the first and best, it is also said: "Hesitant, he does
not utter words lightly. When his task is accomplished and his work
done, the people all say, ‘It happened to us naturally.'"

The school people make an excellent example
of the Fourth Ruler, which is what makes Ferris Beuler's Day Off
at once a delightful romp and a real lesson in morality, unlike preachments.
Like all Fourth Rulers, the schoolers seem actually to have dedicated
themselves to uttering all their words lightly, espousing now this cause,
now that, and sponsoring the value of the month and cultural relativism
at the same time.

The parents who worry about the authority
of the family end up, if they succeed, as Third Rulers, who will, as
they should, lose their authority just as soon as the children are able
to find jobs and compete with the Japanese. There are some clever politicians
among us who have it in common with rock stars and other sorts of celebrities
that they become, for a while, the Second Rulers. Oh how we love them,
but when they are gone, how little they turn out to have made us better
than we were.

If the First Ruler is a shadowy presence,
it is because he is sitting quietly in a private place, passing through
the fire of questioning and doubt, asking himself whether he should
believe what he believes, considering the difference between what can
be known and what can only be supposed, and wondering how best to bring
his subjects into that condition which he has found, that is, into the
fire. He knows that is will hurt them, but he knows too that it will
cleanse them. And he never lets them know that he broods on it night
and day.

Dust on Teachers' Shelves

But polls also show that most teachers
object to the concept of morality education on philosophical or practical
grounds; many fear that such programs will stir up controversy in
classrooms where diverse student bodies already cause plenty of headaches.
Even districts that have printed values curricula and issued teaching
materials at great expense find that such items often gather
dust on teachers' shelves. (Our italics)

SOMETIMES, let's be
fair about it, the schoolteachers show lots of good sense. And, even
more to admired than rubies in these days of hemorrhoid commercials
and worse, an uncommonly delicate restraint. It takes, well, nothing
less than old-fashioned gentility to cover up printed values curricula
and teaching materials with nothing more foul than dust. They may not
want to teach the distinguishing of the better from the worse,
but they can do it.

The passage above is from the Wall
Street Journal. It is more moaning and groaning about the whole
values teaching business, dedicated mostly to the apparent reluctance
of teachers, on whom Bennett is depending in his drug war, to get involved
in the hassle. It's hard to blame them. It may even be that the morality
mess has driven them in the direction of the right conclusion, to wit,
that the moral behavior of one person may be none of another person's
business, and, even more important and interesting, that the moral behavior
of the citizens is none of a government worker's goddamned business.
We do suspect that if those curricula and teaching materials were designed
to teach the children what is legal and what is not legal, the teachers
would use them. And that would be exactly appropriate work for an agent
of the government that makes and enforces the law. So we begin this
brief consideration of a tangled and repulsive topic by letting the
schoolteachers off the hook.

It's the people who make those
values curricula and teaching materials who deserve the hook. They are
the great expense at which such stuff is made. They are also astoundingly
arrogant folk who imagine that they can answer questions that have been
asked and mulled over for the whole history of humanity, and astonishingly
ignorant folk who suppose that the questions answered long ago still
need to be answered. Arrogant and ignorant people in the service of
a government are not only a great expense, but also one of the four
things that the earth can not bear--a servant when he rideth.

Cultural trivia question: Name the other
three. Dare of the Month: Name the other three in public. Doubledare
of the Month: Name the other three in a public school and stir up controversy
where diverse student bodies already cause plenty of headaches. It's
an interesting thought, and maybe a clue.

That little bit of perspicacious wisdom
is not going to be found in the values curricula and teaching materials,
of course, but we do wonder--if it were, and if it were typical of those
materials, would teachers decide to take them off the shelf? After all,
what we have here is a little poem: "For three things the earth
doth tremble, and for four which it can not bear..." The schools
do make use of poetry. They even encourage children to write it. What
does it mean to say, absurdly, it seems, that the earth trembles, and
that it can not bear something? Nonsense. And yet, and yet. Are
there some things that people can be, and are, and with which
children are not unacquainted, that just seem so perverse and unnatural
that no less a power than Earth herself might at least be dreamed of
as fearing their very existence? Who are those people, and who are others
like them. How do people get to be that way? How come they can't see
for themselves how they look to the rest of us? Is there hope of cure?
If you know one of them, is there anything you can do? And if there
is, should you do it?

What a great discussion this would make
for children, and for their teacher as well, provided only that the
teacher is not a servant who rideth. The ordinary public school, to
say nothing of the countless other agencies of social engineering to
which all children are subjects, would provide students with examples
beyond counting of exactly what is meant by a servant who rideth, a
person who is supposed to serve but has gotten aboard a high horse and
come to behave like one who was born to command and control.

And what is to be learned? Who knows?
Maybe, for some, nothing, or, to be more accurate, nothing just now.
For others, maybe a hint, a suggestion as to how not to live, one kind
of person, at least, not to become. But the far more important question
is this: What harm can come of such a deliberation? Will some be deceived
or misled? Will some suppose themselves commanded or preached to by
an unknown poet who has been dead for thousands of years and who has
no intention at all of doing a number on a bunch of helpless children
who need indoctrination? Will some ethnic or religious way of life be
held up to ridicule? Will the guidance counselor and the assistant principal,
who just happen to be servants on horseback, file a grievance and sue
in the courts for an act of discrimination against the officious and
overbearing?

None of that will happen. But here is
something that will happen. The children, all the children, the rich
and the poor, the quick and the slow, the black and the brown and the
white, all of them will recognize that servant on horseback, and learn,
not at all to their surprise but much to their edification, that he
has been around for a long, long time, and that some ideas about right
and wrong are permanent and universal, and that they, little children,
already knew that. A great lesson.

But lessons like that will never be taught
in the schools, because teachers, now back on the hook, have left something
else on the shelves. With those "materials" that deserve it,
they have rejected the good books, which don't.

Postscript on the Poem

The poem is from a
good book, but it is one of those books that schools can not use. The
school people imagine that its use would violate the separation of church
and state and bring them into controversy. This book, of course, is
claimed by at least three very large and powerful clubs of believers,
Christians, Jews, and Moslems, of whom none will be displeased by the
superstitious belief of the educationists that at least one of those
crowds must own the idea that a snooty clerk is an abomination, and
that to consider it would be to further the missionary effort of a religion.

That is a quaint notion, a modern version
of belief in sympathetic magic. But it was certainly not a Christian
or a Moslem who wrote that poem, and it may not even have been a Jew.
Scholars allow the possibility of a Philistine, whose "church"
is now out of business, and our own guess would be a Babylonian not
unacquainted with bureaucrats. He, however, was not the first to notice
the strange susceptibility of certain persons to degeneration of character
as a result of promotion.

For some it seems impossible, but it is
a good idea to give some thought to the difference between doctrine
and wisdom. Out of a neurotic and finicky fastidiousness, the people
who rig up such hokum as values curricula always end up not only throwing
out all that we can find of wisdom in the books of thoughtfulness beyond
counting, but also substituting for it tendentious and dogmatic teaching
materials made up of doctrine--the new and trendy doctrine, of course,
but still doctrine.

So, if you knew the other three things
for which earth trembles, you would know that the poem can never show
up in school. Here they are: A fool when he is filled with food; an
odious woman when she is married; a handmaid that is heir to her mistress.

All of that comes from the thirtieth chapter
of Proverbs, but even if it had come from John Dewey, who probably knew
all that but would never admit it in public, the doctrine of our modern
schoolchurch would not want the laity even to have heard of it. Such
ideas can only be one more occasion of sin.

Brief Notes

Central Control announces
that the First Annual Underground Grammarian Picnic will take place,
rain or shine, on the first Saturday of August, 1990. All who attend
should feel free to bring children, friends, students, and even dogs.
Also, something to eat and drink. Details and maps will be sent out
with the next two issues, both of which, we do hope, will appear long
before the day of the picnic. The UG phone number is 609-589-6477.